The Sherman Antitrust Act was signed into law on July 2, 1890, by President Benjamin Harrison. The law was the first action taken by the federal government to place limits on business monopolies, trusts, and cartels and to prevent restraints on trade such as price fixing. The idea was to keep a single executive or group of executives (called trustees) from cornering a section of the American economy and running it entirely in their own interest, to the exclusion of any competition. The Sherman Antitrust Act was written up by the Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio, who had once served as secretary of the treasury under President Rutherford B. Hayes. The intention of the act was to protect consumers from big businesses that were using unscrupulous means to raise prices artificially, such as intentionally producing too few goods to meet consumer demand and thereby driving up the products’ value and price. At first, Congress clearly had little intention of enforcing the act. As one of its supporters, Senator George Hoar (RMA), explained, if a business received its market share because it produced the best product or provided the best service, then the business was not in violation of the act. Such sentiment made it easy to decide that, for example, the cheap supply of petroleum to the American market by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company was not in violation of the act if the government determined that American consumers could afford to buy gasoline and kerosene.